Brick House

Description Brick House:

This family house stands amongst dense residential buildings in a busy
part of West London. The land is shaped like a horse’s head, surrounded
by three taller buildings, and can only be reached by a carriageway
through the facade of an adjacent Victorian terrace. The paradox of
making a new building on a site of almost insuperable difficulty can
only be explained by the will of the clients, and their determination
to make a new home in this particular part of the city where
conventional sites were used up many years ago.

In this design, the accidental but wildly spatial shape of the
site has been used to form the living spaces. The interior plan is
completely separate from the typologies of the London town-house or the
inner city loft, while still retaining a strong sense of dwelling at
the heart of the city. Walking around the house takes you across broad
spaces, to corners with windows overlooking small gardens, to intimate
rooms deep inside. The exterior form of the house that is generated by
this varied arrangement is incomprehensible from within. Instead, the
form appears unbound and soft, as if an internal force is pressing the
walls and roof out against the buildings around it.

The floors and walls of the house are built of brick, inside and
out. The use of one material binds the whole building into an
enveloping body, emphasising a skin-like character over any tectonic
expression. The arrangement of the bricks within the mortar shifts as
surfaces stretch, bend and twist, making them appear elastic. The
ceiling of the upper floor is cast concrete and adopts different levels
to make particular spaces within the overall deep plan. A flat ceiling
appears to press down over the dining table, and a domed profile forms
the high ceiling over the main living space.

Externally the house can only be seen in parts, glimpsed in
strange views from pavements and out of the windows of the surrounding
houses. At the entrance, a big door within the Victorian facade opens
to a wide entranceway leading upwards. Like a Baroque chapel in Rome
buried deep within the city’s close pattern of narrow streets, the
expansive interior is a place of escape and dreams.